2016 Presidential Debates – If I Were a Moderator

One of the things the talking heads are always discussing is “Can candidate X relate to the American people?” They use terms like likeability, relatability, and so on. Well, maybe we shouldn’t have to wonder if they can relate to us. Maybe we shouldn’t have to choose between people who are so out of touch that they have to literally have advisors help them relate to us, because, well, they really can’t.

If I were a moderator, I would ask questions like:

“When is the last time you drove a car?”

“Can you drive a stick shift?”

“When is the last time you went to the grocery store?”

I’d then have the candidates walk outside with me to the parking lot of the debate venue. I’d point at several identical vehicles, give them an address to a supermarket on the other side of town, give them a shopping list, a debit card with only $100 on it, and say…. go!”

After they passed this basic test, we would move on to the issues facing America today and in the future.

This may sound silly, but many of these people, especially the people who have been government royalty for multiple decades, having had tax payer funded security details and limousines for their transportation, may be so far out of touch with reality that they can’t perform even the most basic tasks of the people they want to rule. If you can’t walk a mile in my shoes, then you have no business telling me what to do.

I’d venture to guess that there are people on that stage that couldn’t pull off such a simple assignment.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t expect the president to be an average person. As a matter of fact, I don’t want them to be. I want them to be someone who has shown that they have what it takes to succeed (outside of government). If you can’t succeed in your own life, you probably can’t create an environment that’s conducive to my success. I just want them to not be so far removed from reality, that they no longer have a concept of what our reality really is–outside of their focus groups, that is.